But artists are a surprisingly hardy lot–many of them still work in unheated lofts and live off almost nothing in sales–and by the end of the year spirits, if not livelihoods, had returned to normal. Or at least close enough so we can look back and appreciate the genuine highlights of 2001:
- Richard Serra (Gagosian Gallery, New York, Oct. 18-Dec. 15)
What can you say about a show of “torqued ellipses” and other elemental forms, made from about a zillion pounds of rusting steel, that simply made you happy–no, overjoyed–just to be in the gallery? “Thank you, Richard, for rescuing abstract art from the doldrums,” that’s what.
- “Vermeer and the Delft School” (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, March 8-May 27) and the standing-room-only conference on David Hockney’s contention that the old masters used lenses to help them paint realistically (New York University, Dec. 1-2).
There can never be too many Vermeer shows, even if he did turn out to have used a camera lucida to plot his interior scenes. This one expertly placed him in the context of his times and showed why Pieter de Hooch and friends are but respectable runners-up. As for Hockney’s ideas, he may have appplied them to a few too many artists. (Some argue that Vermeer is one of the unfairly accused.) But his theory did manage to produce the most fiesty symposium in years, and rachet up the public’s interest in fine art in the bargain.
- “Spunky” (Exit Art, New York, Sept. 8-Oct. 27)
Nobody does this avant-fleamarket-type of show (anything goes, with really young, totally unknown artists) better than this sprawling, eccentric not-for-profit loft space. And so many galleries have fled to the trendier Chelsea district that EA is now the heartbeat of art in SoHo.
- Thomas Eakins (Philadelphia Museum of Art, Oct. 6-Jan. 6)
America’s greatest painter? Probably. Even though he “cheated” by using photographs to help him compose? Sure. Was it wrong for the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts to have fired him for allowing women to draw nude male models? Of course. Was this the best American museum show of the year? In spades.
- “L’Esprit Nouveau: Purism in Paris, 1918-1925” (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, April 29-Aug. 5)
This little “-ism” followed on the heels of cubism and featured but three painters: the famous Fernand Leger, the little-known Amedee Ozenfant, and Charles Jeanneret (who later became better known as Le Corbusier, the architect). In original conception and meticulous execution, Carol Eliel did the curating job of the year.
- “Freestyle” (Studio Museum in Harlem, April 28-June 24)
Many people thought that curator Thelma Golden’s first big “emerging black artists” show would be filled with rote angry politics and essentialist cliches. Oh, “Freestyle” indeed had some of each, but the show as a whole was fresh, inventive and surprisingly funny. Its alumni have quickly become rising stars in the gallery scene, too.
- “Color, Myth, and Music: Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Synchromism” (North Carolina Museum of Art, March 4-July 1)
A perfect match: one of the more underappreciated American art museums, and the man who invented American abstract painting while he was in Paris in the 1910s. The show eventually traveled to Los Angeles, where Macdonald-Wright was a major presence until he died in 1973.
- Robert Gober (U.S. Pavilion, Venice Biennale, June 6-Nov. 10)
It would be nice to say that Gober was the instant highlight of this mediocre Biennale. He wasn’t: the critics grumbled that his austere installation of such objects as a beat-up Styrofoam block painstakingly recreated in bronze was dry and ungiving. But with each passing day after the opening, it became clearer that Gober’s difficult sculptural narrative (about being gay) was practically the only art in a show gone tackily showbiz.
- Ron Mueck (James Cohan Gallery, New York, May 11-June 16)
He’s the best realist artist at work anywhere, and that his medium is sculpture is all the more amazing. Sometimes he goes super-life-size (as in a self-portrait mask with individual graying stubble hairs) and sometimes he goes small (a woman just having given birth, holding her infant). Mueck’s psychological astuteness is too profound to be mere facility.
- Malcolm Morely (Hayward Gallery, London, June 15-Aug. 27)
The photorealist-turned-expressionist orphan of the touted “School of London” (David Hockney, Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon, and R. B. Kitaj) finally got his due with this quirky retrospective. And it had a real bounce to it.
